We’ve all been HERE, right?  You just get one of those days…or weeks…when you can’t blog.  Maybe you’re down with the flu or carpal tunnel or your in-laws are in town and they brought their kids and it’s just not the thing to do in polite society to hit them over the head with a shovel and bury them in the back yard.

That and the wife would kill you next.

But anyway.  A lot of people have been in the situation where they just can’t blog, and so they turn their attention to finding a temporary guest blogger.  And if you ever find yourself in that opportunity, you should take advantage of it.

Why?  Simple.

It builds credibility.  Your work is now suddenly seen by a segment of the population that may not ordinarily see it.  Now a whole new group of blog readers get to discover how skilled a writer you are, and how deep your expertise runs.

You can get free links.  Tell all your newfound readers that there’s another great source of information out there, and it’s all available at the end of one easy to follow link.  Not everyone may take advantage of it, but any that do do so for the low, low price of a guest blog post.

You can discover new topics to write about.  Maybe you haven’t heard about one big thing or another that’s making the blogging rounds.  But with a guest shot on another blog, you can catch up.

There are lots of reasons to take a guest blogging engagement.  Sometimes, you’re even paid.  But whether there’s actual cash involved or not, it’s still worth your time to step in for someone else for a day or two.

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There’s no such thing as a right way to write; everyone has their own unique writing style. However, it is important to pay attention to your intended audience and cater to them appropriately. Making the right decision on to maintain a style that reaches out to your demographic ensures that you attract that same user base, and keep bringing them back for more.

By using website data statistics, you can easily track what type of people read your blog. Whether it be 6-14 year old males, or 18-24 year old females, it’s important to consider these as the deciding factors on how to change your perspective on blogging.

Suppose you had an audience that is pretty young. You will want to have a much more casual approach to your blog, avoiding expository writing to some degree. Give the reader something they can laugh about and relate to. If you have an audience that is a specific gender, you will want to have bloggers that are the same gender, and appeal to them accordingly.

One of the biggest mistakes blogs make is when multiple writers don’t have a consensus on what their writing style is. For example, one of the writers will write in a completely narrative mode, while the next will immediately shift to an argumentation style. This causes confusion to the reader, and the flow of the blog is constantly at risk.

There are certain sites in which a very solid news style of writing is necessary, however, blogs in general don’t qualify for that route most of the time. It is up to you as the blogger to make the right decisions on how to modify your writing style for your audience. If you need more tips on how to structure your writing, reading up on High School Journalism never hurt anybody. The fundamentals are what brings success to any blog.

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Do you use your stats to tell you when your readers are visiting your blog? Did you realize that you can learn a lot about your audience from them?

Using the stats for your blog can give you big clues as to when you should post your items for maximum coverage.  Wordpress for example allows you to set times and dates for a blog post to be published, so why not experiment a little and see what the results show.

Knowing when your audience is most receptive to your blog can go a long way to increasing your traffic.  Using the same types of tools to monitor when you release promotions about your blog will also help - for example pre-scheduling Tweets on Twitter to send out the link to your blog at different times of the day. You might be surprised by the results you see when you post your blog at 2am your time and suddenly get a whole new readership from a different timezone.

Learning about your audience, in even the most basic of ways will make you a better blogger and give you the ability to keep your audience one you have them.

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